Does local cryotherapy improve thermal diagnosis similar to whole-body cryotherapy in spinal diseases?

Armand Cholewka,Agata Stanek,Zofia Drzazga,Karolina Sieroń-Stołtny,Magdalena Wójcik

doi:10.1007/s10973-016-5453-3

Armand Cholewka, Agata Stanek + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10973-016-5453-3

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Abstract

Thermal imaging has been used for patients with spinal diseases who were qualified by their physicians for whole-body treatment or local cryotherapy. The experimental groups of patients consisted of 20 males aged 51.6 ± 9.0 (12 treated by whole-body cryotherapy and 8 by local cryotherapy). The distribution of the skin surface temperature was monitored by using a Thermovision Camera E60 before and immediately after body cooling. The chosen spinal region (Th5/Th6–L5/S1) was taken into consideration for all of the research groups. An essential drop in skin temperature and a better differentiation of the body surface temperatures (leading to an increase in the diagnostic value of thermography) was observed after both methods of cold impact. In order to estimate the usefulness of thermovision used after body cooling, the quantitative parameters including temperature contrast—the difference between the maximum and minimum temperatures before and after cold impact and relative contrast ratio (related to the average temperature of the selected area of interest, before and after cooling, respectively)—were compared for both kinds of medical treatment. The statistical analysis proved that significant differences between the parameters obtained before and after body cooling in the case that patients treated by local and whole-body cryotherapy are similar. However, local therapy is cheaper and easy for application while whole-body therapy can give more information about the state of soft tissues for the whole back.

Highlights

Internal body temperature gives us information about the condition of each part of the body
Thermal images of the two representative patients treated by whole-body cryotherapy (WBC—Fig. 1) and local cryotherapy (LC—Fig. 2) suffering from low back pain performed before (a) and immediately after (b) cold treatment are presented
An essential drop of skin temperature was observed due to cold impact causing a bigger differentiation of the body surface temperature and an increase in the diagnostic value of thermography in contrast to what was reported in earlier papers [2, 7, 11,12,13, 15]

Summary

Introduction

Internal body temperature gives us information about the condition of each part of the body. A very simple way to avoid these problems is using noncontact thermometry thermovision It is a well-known skin temperature gradient and its changes are very good disease indicators and their associations with local blood flow and changing metabolism, mostly in the superficial skin layer, can bring some information about metabolism. This is why thermovision can be widely and used in medical diagnosis [5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16]. There are many different physical factors used in medicine, mostly in physical medicine, that can have influence on changes in the temperature response of the human body [5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16]

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